I was just re-reading Dorothy Rodger's "My Favorite Things" and she describes this very room! "It is a high-fashion house, entirely in black and white: walls, upholstery, carpets throughout all the rooms and halls. The ash-trays are heavy crystal, the lighting is dimmed or brightened by rheostats and the only color anywhere comes dramatically from the exciting collection of modern paintings. I especially remember one evening we spent there. Hope Preminger looked beautiful; her black hair is prematurely frosted, and she was dressed in white. Otto wore a black suit. We were served caviar and sour cream. I really felt I might spoil the decor if I asked for a piece of lemon."

I was in Preminger's NY office once during the 1960s, and it was nothing like this. Instead, fairly small, business-like with a bar, and quite ordinary, like hundreds of other midtown Manhattan offices.

I bought my wife a copy of My Favorite Things, a very engaging book about designing and building the house of your dreams. Dorothy had a very clever idea along with her other good ideas on design. She papered the walls of the utility room with the original blueprints. Anyone doing carpentry repairs, or plumbing and electrical work could see everything in the original design.

Our Statement of Principle

“And, of course, that is what all of this is - all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs - that song, endlessly reincarnated - born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 - same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness."-- Nick Tosches